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Star Trek Online Wiki talk:Community Portal
Category:Community This is the general discussion page for the wiki! New founders should leave a nice welcome message and encourage new visitors and editors to leave a note to get the conversation started. ---- Welcome! Hello and welcome! We hope you'll join our wiki and help contribute to it. Make pages, edit other pages, and have fun! --Carbon Fiber Man 00:34, 7 October 2008 (UTC) The lack of self-written content in articles = copyright breaches I've noticed something on this wiki that concerns me. Currently articles such as ones about missions and characters are simply verbatim copy-pastes of in-game text dialogue. Not only does this not provide any tangible information for the user (starting a character article with their opening text dialogue is extremely confusing), it is also (from my understanding of wiki writing) a breach of copyright, which is not a great situation for any wiki to be in. Now, I have some suggestion on how to overhaul the wiki, but I thought I might put out this issue here for discussion. Thoughts? --FFN 11:15, February 16, 2010 (UTC) : My main concern is trying to decrease the confusion as STO has brought out people who've never played MMOs before to people who maybe possibly only have the last Star Trek movie as their only realm of Star Trek knowledge. As such I've been trying to keep labels matched the way they are in game (i.e. Species instead of Races, Traits are Traits not Abilities >.< ... I'm still not sure how to label the Powers/Skills/Abilities). I've copied the initial dialogue from missions and linked them if possible as sometimes the biggest issue in the game so far is "where's X?" and X is actually listed in the mission text, but might easily be missed. How many times have you seen "where's the admiral?" or "where's sulu?" - and those are specifically stated in the mission text as to where they are & the first thing you see when beaming onto Earth Starbase is "Admiral's Office". As to the character dialogue on the pages that I've started I added as I figured the pages were fairly bare if all I did was post a picture - please feel free to change these, delete the text, whatever. : I'm still finding pages that were added based on pre-release information that needs to be updated or deleted like the Ranks page & I don't even know where the Supplemental Logs came from. Official Star Trek information I'd rather just give a brief bit of information and then link to memory-alpha or similar (like on the Klingon Empire page). If you have ideas or suggestions for how the character pages should be presented &/or idea for a template, please step in. I know there's been template discussions between Wagnike2, Ariyen, Metalbaswee, & myself & honestly I think we need some central location to discuss these rather than switching back & forth between various people's talk pages. : Another issue is I'm overly lazy and while the various Lists are nifty and some people like them, I don't have time to bother updating them especially when most of the stuff a list page does is duplicate what Categories do. Adding list pages imo just duplicates the work and there's always the issue of needing to sync correct spellings and such. For example Non-player_characters has gone through several corrections and I still don't think it's fixed nor is it complete when comparing it to Category:Non-Player Characters. : I'd rather not be the primary contributor to this wiki :) My admin status was dumped on me because the original admin disappeared & I've apparently added a ton of stuff. --Pteague 13:25, February 16, 2010 (UTC) :* To contribute, a lot of this information on this Wiki was added prior to the release of the game in order to get it ready for release. Hence, a lot of the copy and pasting from other sources. While this isn't necessarily the goal of any Wikia, sometimes it's necessary at the beginning in order to get the Wikis to take off and gain contributors. :* The Supplemental Logs actually come from the Star Trek Online website, they are interesting to add to the site for the chronology they help to create. As far as "copyright" violations go, I don't believe that we are violating this because the information is free for all and we aren't using it to make a profit. Also, it'd also be "cheapening the canon" to re-write the Supplemental Logs that have been created by the people on that. :* As far as lists go, they can be very difficult to maintain consistently especially with limited time. :* Overall, I'd say that we are doing the best we can with this Wiki. I know that we don't have as many contributors as we would like to have and that none of us have enough time to do what we wish we could on this Wiki. All I can say is that we can just do the best that we can do. Hope my weighing in on this issue helps. - Wagnike2 17:17, February 16, 2010 (UTC) Here is how I think articles should be handled: If applicable, the article begins with the fictional history of subject, from what is presented from the game and canon Star Trek historical information. Nothing too wordy, concise and informative will do. Eg. "Captain What's His Name is commander of the Federation starbase Deep Space Nine in the Beta Ursae Sector." Or "The Rapier class Escort was launched in the early 25th century, sharing design similarities with her sister ships, the Saber and Ushaan classes. The lead ship of this class, the [[USS Rapier|USS Rapier]] was lost in the Bajoran Wormhole in 2403." Gameplay :Information about the character or subject as it pertains to game play (with spoiler tags, if such templates have been created on this wiki, as needed), and a list of (with links to) the missions the character appears in or gives out. External links *A link to Memory Alpha and/or Memory Beta's article on the character or subject, if applicable. Thoughts? --FFN 04:52, February 17, 2010 (UTC) : I see that this Wiki does need help. I will be happy to be a contributor to this Wiki. I am waiting for the game to arrive now, and will update and improve the Wiki where I can. I have been following the franchise for quite some time, and while most of my knowledge is from TNG and DS9 days, I definitely grasp most of the concepts that I will see in the game. I agree that copying straight from the in game text is a little bit unhelpful and insight into some of the lore or strategy on each specific mission would probably be more useful. Terminology is definitely a big area I will maintain my focus on. Links to memory alpha never hurt either.:) --Desert dwarf 16:19, March 6, 2010 (UTC) Images Continuing my "question everything done on this wiki" rant, for the most part, I believe images used on this wiki should be restricted to screen shots of in-game content. For example, It seems as though most of the starship images people have uploaded are high-res renders or movie screen shots found on google image search. --FFN 11:26, February 16, 2010 (UTC) : Another thing I've found annoying beyond that is that the uploaded image name was set as whatever the filename of the image they uploaded was (i.e. A22bc354bv.jpg instead of Ship_Name.jpg). I would move these to the appropriate location if I knew how, but my knowledge of mediawiki is limited & without direct access to the server's filesystem & database I'm at a loss as to how to "move" these to the correct name. : I started to take a couple of screenshots of the various versions of the Light Cruiser, but apparently I messed up and haven't had time to go back and take screenshots. My thought was to go into the "Customize Your Ship", get an appropriate angle, and then click through the various basic templates, but I've not had time to do this yet... maybe after I reach Admiral. So far I'm overly busy with just taking the portrait pics for the various characters. In order to get any kind of a screenshot with the UI the game has to be in windowed mode, press Alt+Print Screen, & then paste in a graphics program (I use paint as it has a fairly small footprint). I then save as a png on my fileserver, open on my work desktop (shares the same desk) in GIMP, mark the portrait area, copy, paste into new image. : As above, I'd love some help fixing up this wiki. The time I have available to play the game & add stuff to this wiki will be decreasing soon. --Pteague 13:25, February 16, 2010 (UTC) :* Per above, I'd say that it would be idealistic to have only game screenshots. But the problem is that some people a.) don't know how to take the screenshots and b.) I'm sure some of the contributors don't have the game, but like contributing information (maybe). Hence why I think that it'd be a bit pointless to "ban" screenshots from movies, because why they aren't the game's ship, they still serve as the basis. Though, I think a good solution would be in those cases to add a photo of the ship from a movie and a photo of the ship from the game. - Wagnike2 17:19, February 16, 2010 (UTC) :I agree with Wagnike2, we should have screenshots of the game, instead of those of the movie, it will more attractive for users either anonymous or regustered. The Valader 18:22, February 16, 2010 (UTC)